A Girl Named Maple

When I was four years old I knew a girl named Maple who could pull off her left arm. It wasn’t a prosthetic or anything; she could actually yank her arm off. She had some kind of disease or something, I think. A disorder maybe. Sometimes she’d pull it off and let me play with it. She could make the fingers wiggle from across the room.

Once, a bully called Squash stole Maple’s arm and climbed a tree. He crouched up there like an ape, holding Maple’s arm over his head, laughing. The whole thing was so mean. Maple was crying, pleading with him to give it back. Squash’s mom finally came out and yelled at him to come down and return Maple’s arm.

He handed it to her and then took off. I watched her reconnect her arm. The part where it connected to her shoulder secreted this sticky white slime that smelled like maple syrup. I guess that’s what let her stick it back on. Maybe it healed it back to her shoulder or something. I don’t know.

     

 Anyway, that’s probably where she got her name.

     

 Or maybe this was all a dream.

More goddamn stories in these books here...

Stable (full version)

 

                                                If you can read this you are NOT Glen Fadlo of Waltham, CT.

Bleak Holiday Sits Here. Click!

This story resides in the Bleak Holiday collection.

  The man sat at the table, drenched in the dense California sunlight that burned through the glass patio doors - American sunlight - and he felt like an important part of an important moment. He was in this place now. He stirred his coffee and scanned his newspaper and felt satisfied. He felt proud of his house, his career. He loved his wife. He realized this with urgent clarity and a gratitude that usually eluded him. The sounds of Carol fixing breakfast in the kitchen comforted him, secured him to the world, and after a while the smell of bacon and toast traveled through the swinging door and he felt better still. It was a perfect moment, an exact moment, when the very molecules of existence seemed to coalesce and charge his darkening heart; a heart that had begun to harden and retreat from the anxious complications of impending middle age.  

     The newspaper was still filled with the recent tragedy. A great American had died in Dallas at the hands of a troubled young man, and then the young man was in turn gunned down by a man with a jeweled name who ran a nightclub. He wondered if he should feel so calm and contented so soon after a national calamity and with this thought, the perfect moment was gone. One brief blaze of doubt had kindled it to mist.

      The man felt diminished again.

A Chapter from Conservatory of Death

  

                              This book is sleazy and morbid and makes its own gravy.

Available Right Here

“Drizzle,” Posy said. “Drizzle drizzle drizzle drizzle drizzle drizzle drizzle...”

     It was drizzling. Early afternoon. Posy Pendleton watched beads of precipitation sparkle across the singing neon above her head: LIVE NUDE GIRLS in dazzling phosphorescent color, bathed in popping aqueous jewels. Humming, trilling. She stared at the sign, hypnotized by its celestial beauty.

     “Drizzle drizzle drizzle...” The word had lost its meaning. It had puffed into an amorphous blob, a hazy shape of faded contours and air. “Drizzle.”

Interview

 From Hell's Heart, I Interview Thee!

Saying the same word over and over and over (and over) and over until it doesn't make sense anymore...

Razor Wire Kiss; The Rest of the First Chapter

    

     MotherFUCKERS! Who are they anyway? Buncha pigs and pussies. Fuck ‘em all!

     He staggered down the cement ramp to the parking lot.

     The sun was gone but the merciless heat still filled the night. Christ. He didn’t feel like going home yet, didn’t feel like facing Donna’s bruised, miserable face.

     He walked around to the back of the bar.

     The sweet smell of marijuana greeted him on the other side. Two young couples were hanging around the basement bulkhead, passing a joint. They turned away and got quiet when they noticed Roland coming around the corner.

Razor Wire Kiss; Excerpt

This is how my vampire novel (the only one I will ever write) starts. -- H.K.

CHAPTER ONE

It begins with a kiss…

     Donna sat on the kitchen floor, crying, her face hidden behind a veil of long brown hair.

     Roland stood by the refrigerator, watching her narrow shoulders tremble with the force of her sobs and her small white hands shaking between her folded legs.

     He went to the sink and rinsed the blood from his fists, drying his hands on his T-shirt. “I’m going out for awhile,” he told her. He opened the refrigerator, grabbed a bottle of beer, twisted off the cap and flicked it at her, making her flinch. “Is that okay with you, honey?”

     She didn’t answer. Another drop of blood fell from her nose, further embroidering the dark red splash-pattern spreading across her naked thighs.

     He left the house, slamming the screen door.

     Shemp, Donna’s cross-eyed Doberman pinscher, started barking, tensing against the chain that tethered him to the side of the house - gnashing jaws sending droplets of froth into the heavy air.

     “Shut up!”

     One day he was going to put that dog to sleep. Nighty-night asshole.

Bleak Holiday, Plasma and a Winking Leopard

Finally - at long last - the unanticipated sequel to The Membranous Lounge that no one asked for! Behold, Bleak Holiday!

There are some people that hate this cover but me, I like it.

Bleak Holiday

Dig it today!

 PLASMA

Plasma in the driveway

Plasma on the grass

Plasma on the bus seat

But Plasma has no pass

Plasma in the shopping mall

Staining all the gowns

Plasma being ushered out

Of ugly, angry towns

Plasma is my beverage

Plasma is my hope

Plasma is my Parson

Plasma is my Pope

And when I’m dead and buried

With Plasma in my grave

I’ll seep into the soil

No longer Plasma’s slave 

Aw, I think the leopard likes you.

Dink

Obituaries from Yesteryear

      I wouldn't take that cotton candy, kid.

“Happy” Herman Halperin, local children’s TV host, dies at 52.

Herman Halperin, who followed a thirteen year career as a beloved children’s television host with controversy, drug abuse, bouts of mental illness, and two arrests, died at St. Simeon Memorial Hospital yesterday. He was 52.

Happy Herman’s Ha-Ha House debuted on WGZR, channel 8, in September 1955. Hosting the show from a memorable art-deco set designed with sharp-angled walls, crooked doors, and askew windows that looked out on leering cartoon faces, Happy Herman gave many Clearhaven children their first exposure to Popeye, Woody Woodpecker and The Little Rascals.

The Incredible Melting Man (in Wild Violet)

      The original incredible Melting Man

A short, very short story o' mine...

The Incredible Melting Man

A Girl Scout once came to my door taking orders for 

cookies but she was so vague and cryptic about everything 

that I couldn’t, with confidence, order any.

 

In Sequence

Kitty Litter In Sequence

Excerpt From My Novel, "The Famous Well-Equipped Twins"

Chapter One

They were standing in front of the old boarded-up church on Bristol Street.

     “Gimme a light,” said Kitty, leaning toward Isley, cigarette trembling in the corner of her mouth. Isley snapped a flame from his big silver lighter after three false starts and held it to the tip of her cigarette. His hand was numb and shaking from the cold.

     It was one of those bleak November Sundays when everything is dead and the sky is full of sleet and you’re just waiting for the full weight of winter to come down.

     “Thanks,” said Kitty.

     Peachfuzz was vomiting warm champagne on the granite steps; it hit the stone with a slap, and steam wandered up toward the

streetlight.

     “You okay, Peach?” Kitty asked, drawing on her cigarette.

     Peachfuzz wiped her lips with the back of her glove. 

The Membranous Lounge (Apophenia Edition)

The second edition of The Membranous Lounge is out. Smoother than sandpaper and cleaner than clones!

I like chimps.

You can buy the book here. Please help send my cat to college. 
Here's a bit of nonsense...

It was the first time I’d ever heard of a woman getting arrested for being a peeping Tom.

     “Who were you spying on?” I asked her.

     “This guy next door. I wasn’t trying to see him naked or anything. It wasn’t dirty voyeurism.”

     “Then why were you doing it?”

     “I just wanted to see if he had any secrets.”

     “Did he?”

     “Not that I could see.”
THE END 

Next Book

Another collection of short stories is in the works, tentative title: Bleak Holiday. Also, a new edition of the Membranous Lounge will be published by Apophenia.

And now, a picture of Vic Tayback:

                                   "Stow it, Alice!"

When I was a kid my friend told me he had two hundred comic books. I went over to his house to check it out. They were all the same issue of Jughead.

Conservatory of Death

A morbid pulp novel:

Conservatory of Death

                                                   No, I don't know who that woman is.

Found an old Paas Easter egg coloring kit while cleaning out my kitchen cupboards. I figured, what the hell and spent the day coloring a dozen eggs. It was a lot of work and now I have to make egg salad or something.

The Membranous Lounge is Here!

      Psychedelic monkeys lost in a paisley fog, Mantruth.

My first book is out and you can find it here.

"The pure essence and joy of writing cannot be parsed and analyzed like coleslaw. The vigorous, confident writer must find his or her inspiration from the ordinary things in life. The miraculous boredom one feels among the flowers and trees. The smile of a friend you wish you'd never met." --Hank Kirton from the book, A Writer is Just a Pimp with Herpes.